- Record Label: Everloving
- Release Date: Aug 12, 2008
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Parks proves an ideal partner for George, who grew up studying Shakespeare and is married to a film director, Jake Kasdan.
-
The album's light-fantastic orchestration, courtesy of famed songwriter and composer Parks , is equally delightfully old-fashioned--though George's decidedly contemporary lyrics recall the arch-baroque confessionals of Rufus Wainwright and Fiona Apple. [15 Aug 2008, p.67]
-
Although the daughter of Little Feat's late leader Lowell George charms with a crisp, vibrato-less chirp that suits her airy tunes, the star here is Parks, Brian Wilson's SMiLE collaborator, who surrounds George in a florid orchestral fantasia that flickers like a luscious, precisely gardened flower bed teeming with hidden fauna.
-
George dives in full bore, her voice navigating his undulating road map like so many animated bluebirds flitting through a forest.
-
It’s one of those beguiling albums saved for times alone, times when nothing else would seem quite right.
-
An Invitation adds a new chapter to that story, told in an unmistakably American idiom fusing Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and Copland, spotlighting Inara George as a sophisticated new voice and confirming Van Dyke Parks, at 68, as an inexhaustibly vital national treasure.
-
An Invitation must have been a fun side project, but it may have all the permanence of the summer breeze it captures so perfectly.
-
Under The RadarInvitation will surely add to Park's continuing influences in the pop community. [Fall 2008, p.80]
-
This is an album for Sunday afternoons, for fans of Frank Sinatra and Aaron Copeland, for sophisticates who want music to soothe their minds rather than demand their full attentions.
-
Sometimes the sumptuousness feels a little excessive, like an ice-cream headache. But most of these love songs are uncommon, illuminating and elevating, just like the real thing at its best.
-
An Invitation is not just classy; it’s bourgeois. And worse than that, it’s sporadically boring.
-
The 13 tracks on this sophomore disc can be indistinguishable in their chirpiness, but George's balance of whimsy and a furrowed brow gives the Invitation its lovely charm.